Phonograph, the Brooklyn-based
quintet, released their new album on October 9, 2007 featuring
a logo designed to look like a phonograph company's label titled
Hiawatha Talking Machine manufactured by PHONOGRAPH. This image
is from Phonograph's website portal entry at http://www.phonographny.com/

For the
Record

A new
generation of music collectors is learning the virtues of vinyl.

United
Hemispheres, Summer 2007 by Damon Brown

YOU COULD HAVE A TREASURE
SITTING IN A DAMP CARDBOARD BOX IN YOUR BASEMENT.

Once the preferred medium of aging rockers and Luddite dinosaurs,
records are hip again -- and valuable. "Rock music
can be extremely cheap genre to collect...but if you're interested
in more obscure psychedelia, tiny local bands, and subgenres like
that, then the cost can be astronomical," say Rick Wojcik
of dustygroove.com. In fact, according to Jim Dawson's and Steve
Propes' book 45 RPM, the most expensive 45 single
will run you about $23,000. That's about $8,000 per minute of
music. Invented by Emile Berliner in 1888, vinyl mapped out the
earliest jazz and blues recordings, ushered in rock'n' roll, and
gave listeners disco beats. But an '80s disco backlash and a new
technology called the cassette tape threatened to bury the
record permanently. A generation later, hip-hop DJs, jazz
purists, and hipster musicians respect vinyl not only for its
classic, sensual aesthetics but also for the quality of the sound.
And collecting records is an affordable way to bone up on your
music. "It can still be one of the cheapest ways to acquire
music," Wojcik says. "Both classic albums and rare treasures
can be found cheaply." Ebay and other internet sites,
while great places to browse, should be used only if you're buying
from a reputable source, because you can't inspect records
in person. Finding quality records is a lot like purchasing
fruit: You want them to be shiny, with no marks, scratches, or
flaws. As with most collecting, "the important thing is to
find music that you like," says Rick Morey of thelaughingpapillon.com.
"If you don't get the return you're expecting, you still
have a great collection that you like."

Sunday, 1 April 2007

Gromit
steps into HMV logo role

The world famous
HMV logo is to get a new dog - in the shape of the heroic and
long suffering Gromit.

The new image is based
on the original 1898 His Master's Voice oil painting which features
Nipper the dog listening to an early gramophone recording.

HMV will be using the
image for three months to support the promotion of children's
DVDs at its stores.

Bosses assured customers
Nipper was not in danger and would still represent HMV in other
uses of its logo.

'Much loved'

Aardman's Nick Park
said: "It's a great honour to be stepping in the same paw prints
as an icon as big as Nipper. Gromit will look after 'the seat'
for as long as Nipper allows."

HMV marketing director
Graham Sim said: "I can't imagine that we would have entrusted
our brand to anyone other than Aardman, who, in Wallace and Gromit,
have created a much-loved British institution.

"We're delighted that
Gromit has agreed to stand in for Nipper on this one occasion."

The original picture,
together with its copyright, were sold to the Gramophone Company,
now EMI, for £100 in 1898, with Nipper first appearing on an HMV
record label in 1907.

Listen
Gromit, you’re top dog now

A new
generation of music collectors is learning the virtues of vinyl.

The
Sunday Times, April 1, 2007

THE little dog listening to an old gramophone has been one of
the world’s most instantly recognisable images for 100 years.

Until now. Nipper the terrier is being replaced this week by
Gromit, the Plasticine dog from the Wallace and Gromit animated
series.

The original image is based on a 19th century painting by Francis
Barraud. Nipper was supposed to be listening to a recording of
his dead owner. Hence the name given to the picture: His Master’s
Voice.

Over the past century it has been adopted as a logo by different
record companies in Britain, the United States and Japan, and
by HMV, the world’s biggest chain of record stores.

This week the HMV group is switching to Gromit. The only master’s
voice he is used to is Wallace saying: “Nice cheese, Gromit.”

It is a unique marketing deal in which no money has changed hands.

HMV is to use the Gromit image in the windows of its 220 stores
and in advertisements in the press and on the London Underground
for the next three months as part of a collaboration with Oscar-winning
Aardman Animations, the maker of Wallace and Gromit and films
such as Chicken Run and Flushed Away.

The chain decided on the change to refresh its image and to attract
younger customers.

Aardman’s Nick Park, the film maker behind Wallace and Gromit,
agreed to spend three weeks overseeing the sculpture of a new
4in-high model of the dog listening to a gramophone. Aardman believes
the association will boost sales of DVDs of Gromit’s films and
its other titles.

“It’s a great honour to be stepping in the same pawprints as
an icon as big as Nipper,” said Park last week. “Gromit will look
after the seat for as long as Nipper allows.”

Gennaro Castaldo, HMV’s spokesman, said: “It is a merger of two
much-loved logos. The agreement is for an initial three-month
period, but I imagine it’s very likely that we’ll be discussing
an extension of this and other ways that we can work together
in future.”

With sales of CDs slipping, record stores like HMV are determined
to attract younger customers. Last week a 200-strong queue of
youngsters formed outside its flagship store in London’s Oxford
Street to see Destiny Hope Cyrus, the 14-year-old star of the
Disney Channel television series Hannah Montana.

Other stars who have made personal appearances at the store include
Joss Stone, Girls Aloud, the Killers and Madonna.

Despite their differences in appearance, Nipper and Gromit do
have something in common. Both are from Lancashire.

Nipper, so named because of his tendency to nip visitors’ legs,
lived in Liverpool with Barraud after his first owner, the artist’s
brother, died penniless.

The artist noticed that Nipper used to sit in front of his Edison-Bell
phonograph, an early cylinder recording and playing machine, and
look puzzled as to where the sound came from. He replaced the
phonograph with a gramophone when a gramophone company agreed
to buy the copyright after he completed the painting in 1898.
Nipper first appeared on a letterhead in 1907.

The original painting is valued at £500,000 and is kept in the
boardroom at the headquarters of EMI Records in London.

This phonograph was
seen in a Budapest alley in November 2007 by Friend of the
Phonograph Doug Keister. It has a few modifications, like
the horn and the machine's front panel (featuring an Edison cylinder
label as the machine's banner). This machine is known to some
phonograph collector's as a crap-o-phone. See The
Oldcrank.com for additional information on phonofakes and
forgeries.

Visit Penn Station
in NYC to see a mechanical display of items celebrating New Jersey's
contribution to culture and civilization. Sponsored by the City
of Newark, NJ, an artistic interpretation of Edison's early Phonograph
naturally catches the eye of all Friends of the Phonograph. Behind
the phonograph is another Edison contribution - moving pictures.

Alicia Keys received
five Grammy Awards in 2002. According to Wikipedia, the most Grammys
won by a Female Artist in one night has been accomplished by five
different artists: Lauryn Hill in 1999, Alicia Keys in 2002, Norah
Jones in 2003, Beyonce in 2004 and the members of the Dixie Chicks
in 2007. See Wikipedia for for information about the Gramophone
Awards and current Grammy "records".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammy_Award

CD spins, but not in grave yet

January 20, 2007 - By Mark Brown,, Rocky Mountain News

Hey, guess what? The CD isn't dead after all.

When the compact disc was introduced in 1982 players were expensive
and titles were very few and costly, but CD plants couldn't keep
up with demand.

By 1987 publications like U.S. News and World Report were publishing
articles about "the stunning success of CDs," with customers swarming
"like locusts over the compact-disc bins" while vinyl was relegated
to "no-man's land."

In 1988 the CD overtook vinyl to become the dominant music delivery
format, just six years after being introduced.

Since digital downloading kicked in eight years ago, experts
have been predicting the death of the CD on a yearly basis. But
while CDs had killed vinyl by year eight, according to the year-end
report from Nielsen Soundscan, digital downloads accounted for
less than 6 percent of music sold in 2006 - that pesky CD still
makes up 94 percent of total music sold. Sales of downloaded albums
were up 101 percent from 2005 to 2006. But in 2006 that was still
only 32.6 million albums. CDs, on the other hand, moved 555.6
million units.

The first album available for digital download back in 1999 was
Chuck D's There's a Poison Going On, which kicked off the era
of legitimate downloads. It was institutionalized five years ago
this month when iTunes formally was launched. This month Apple
introduced iPhone, which combines the iPod with cell phones, web
browser and other functions.

All those things have an effect. Nearly 1.2 billion units of
music were sold in '06, but that counts every 99-cent downloaded
track with the same weight as an $18 CD.

And while CD sales are down, we're looking at CDs out of context.
Sure, they had huge growth rates in the '90s when everyone was
replacing their vinyl with CD. But you don't have to replace those
CDs to put them on your iPod - you just load the songs.

The people who spent thousands of dollars on CDs aren't about
to abandon the format right away. Still, CD sales are steadily
on the wane. The market is down 7 percent for total music sales
from '05.

The Dreamgirls soundtrack stayed at No. 1 on the Billboard album
charts this week - but that was on the sale of only 60,000 copies,
the fewest discs sold for the top album since Soundscan started
keeping records back in 1991.

There's no doubt CDs will go away someday. It's just further
away than anyone imagined.

Brownm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2674

Edison's original phonograph
is in the pantheon of revolutionary-but-outdated inventions...

A model of an 1879 street light burns in the Edison Museum in
Edison, N.J., in front of a portrait of inventor Thomas A. Edison.
A California legislator attempted to ban Edison's invention in
favor of a more-efficient fluorescent variety. Photo by Mike
Derer AP

The following excerpt reports a growing movement to replace
incandescent light bulbs with energy efficient fluorescent lighting,
using the phonograph as an example of the march of technology
supplanting outdated inventions.

One of the inventions that put this central New Jersey town on
the map could go the way of the typewriter and the horse and buggy
if some lawmakers have their way.

The incandescent light bulb, perfected for mass use by Thomas
A. Edison in the late 19th century, is being supplanted by fluorescent
lighting that is more efficient and longer lasting,.

Last month, California Assemblyman Lloyd Levine announced he
would propose a bill to ban the use of incandescent bulbs in his
state.

And Thursday, New Jersey Assemblyman Larry Chatzidakis introduced
a bill that calls for the state to switch to fluorescent lighting
in government buildings over the next three years.

"The light bulb was invented a long time ago and a lot of things
have changed since then," said Chatzidakis, a Republican from
Burlington. "I obviously respect the memory of Thomas Edison,
but what we're looking at here is using less energy...."

Many states encourage their residents to replace their incandescent
bulbs through a federal program supported by the Department of
Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency.

In New Jersey, the state where Edison acquired more than 400
patents for innovations such as the phonograph
and electric railroad car, utility is trumping nostalgia.
The state recommends switching to compact fluorescent lamps as
part of its Clean Energy Program.

Even Stanley acknowledges that, more than 125 years after its
invention, the day may be approaching when the incandescent bulb
takes its place alongside Edison's original
phonograph in the pantheon of revolutionary-but-outdated inventions.

"It's a 19th-century invention that was perfected in the 20th
century," he said. "That's part of the evolution of all inventions."

Mailer for Brass Trio concert used a Victor Gramophone with a
horn, trombone connected to where the tone arm would normally
be, and a trumpet in the rear as its promotional logo. February
6, 2007.

CD celebrates
25th anniversary - August 17, 2007

Click
this link to read CNN's article related to August 17, 1982,
"when row upon row of palm-sized plates with a rainbow sheen
began rolling off an assembly line near Hanover, Germany."
The age of the CD had begun.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/ptech/08/17/cd.anniversary.ap/index.html

"The recording industry thrived in the 1990s as music fans
replaced their aging cassettes and vinyl LPs with compact discs,
eventually making CDs the most popular album format."

Ranked Number 8 - iPods Walking down the sidewalk hasn't
been the same since November 2001, when Apple introduced its iconic
portable digital music player. It wasn't the first player, but
fans declared it the coolest and easiest to use by snapping up
more than 100 million of them.

Ranked Number 13 - Flat-panel TVs "RCA pioneered
flat-panel technology in the late 1960s. But it took nearly four
decades before consumers got the idea. This year, 68% of all digital
TVs sold are forecast to come with flat panels."

Ranked Number 22 - TiVo The gadget is now a verb, with
4.4 million subscribers TiVo-ing their favorite TV shows. The
digital device changed TV-viewing habits after the first TiVo
was shipped in 1999.

Ranked Number 25 - Karaoke " What makes you sound
so very good singing Stairway to Heaven? Two stiff drinks
get you on stage in front of amused and horrified co-workers.
But it's the karaoke machine invented in 1983 that really did
the trick. The most popular karaoke song today? Patsy Cline's
Crazy, says Karaoka.com. "

CD player (2007)

yong jieyu + ama

A 2 day workshop with Joris Laarman. The aim is to analyse a
product in its history and function and redesign it.

A CD player was disassembled and the components rearranged to
suit the layout of a phonograph. The speakers are put below the
trumpet loudspeaker for amplification. The wooden box is made
slightly more spacious then the electrical PCB board needed to
achieve bass resonance. The laser pointer is shifted to the top
allowing the spin of the CD to be clearly shown.

By bringing back a familiar nostalgic form of
a phonograph, the design seeks transport the user back to the
golden age of phonographs in early 1900s where sound broadcasting
had a magical feel.

Go to http://www.jieyu-design.com/ for more designs.

25 years - Things
that have gone "Good-bye"

The long goodbye

June 4, 2007 USA Today

This article by USA Today created a list of things that
have changed in the last 25 years. "Times have changed for
Michael Jackson (No. 24 below) and vinyl records (No. 5) since
he released Thriller 25 years ago. Today, we look back at 25 years
of other changes in our lives..." (USA Today did this
as part of their celebration of 25 years in business)

5Vinyl records

Music used to be big. Literally. Before palm-sized CDs took over,
songs were embedded in vinyl platters the size of hubcaps. And
then there were 8-tracks and cassettes. But that's another story.